The Health Central Network: Content Management System – CMS 2.0
We built a world-class content management system for
The Health Central Network, a health care
information provider that operates 20 condition-specific web sites and 15
mini-portals, such as their flagship site
HealthCentral. Quoin was engaged to
implement a replacement for existing content tools and manual processes used at
Health Central. For the CMS 2.0 project, we worked closely with the technology
staff to build a system focused on the day-to-day needs of their production
staff, and realized many of the best practices from more than 10 years of
experience in content management systems. CMS 2.0 supports a complex content
acquisition process, multiple content feeds, content assignment, editing,
publishing, and site management. The design and testing done by the team
produced an application that exhibits outstanding ease-of-use, performance, and
extensibility. Quoin continues to implement additional features for this system,
and to provide ongoing technology support.
"Our company needed a sophisticated content management system to support 35
brand-oriented sites. Quoin provided the depth of experience and technical
know-how to deliver a system that supports our production requirements, and
creates a robust infrastructure for growth. The Quoin team worked with our
staff to resolve the many complex issues that arise naturally during content
management system implementations of this size.”
– Scott Rothrock, Chief Technology Officer, The HealthCentral
Network
CMS 2.0 is comprised of editorial, publishing, and administrative tools.
These tools are designed to facilitate the day-to-day tasks of content
producers, and offer a number of features to quickly publish content to multiple
web sites. The editorial tools support core content management capabilities,
such as creating content, assigning content to commercial and editorial
taxonomies, and assigning content to the “panels” used to define pages.
- Allow a user to search for content and sort the results by a range of
attributes
- Provide a work area for editing, assigning, or publishing content items
- Allow a user to assign content to multiple panels and index pages, and
display a list of locations for an item
- Support a range of content types, including text, rich media, links,
queries, and HTML fragments.
- Provide an integrated WYSIWYG editor, spell-checker, and quick edit feature
that enables users to quickly open a content item for editing
- Support a range of content feeds and formats from external content providers
Users can control the content on the productions web sites using a range of
publishing tools. The system supports automated and on-demand publishing of
modified content and any referring pages.
- Provide the ability to preview index and other pages, as the content will
appear on the live sites
- Allow a user to configure unique URL patterns for each site
- System will automatically publish content, or allow a user to manually
publish content
Allow a user to define rules for automatically purging content, or to
manually purge content from production sites and the content repository
The administrative tools provide an interface to manage all sites, including:
system users, groups, site creation, site structure, page templates, URL
specifications, and site specific rules for content delivery. A system
administrator uses can define page templates, and specify the overall structure
and characteristics for each site.
- Allow a user to manage multiple site trees
- Support syndication of specified content
The system generates pages for a PHP-based delivery system. We used this
approach to ensure support for dynamic content and delivery, including blogs,
forums, and other channels for user-generated content. The advantage of this
architecture is a robust Java-based CMS and a high-performance delivery
environment that uses PHP.
- Support RSS and third-party video streaming
- Enable the sites to deliver third-party advertising
- Support user-generated content, such as user forums and blogs